It’s hard to know which is the more infuriating, the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) initial barbarity in picking on Mrs. Lena Reppert, a 95-year-old lady dying of leukemia, or its defense of this indefensible atrocity: “The [TSA] stood by its security officers Sunday after a Florida woman complained that her cancer-stricken, 95-year-old mother was patted down and forced to remove her adult diaper while going through security.”

And the “Florida woman” should know: the TSA brutalized her as well since she accompanied her mother. Jean Weber reports that Ms. Reppert “entered the airport’s security checkpoint in a wheelchair because she was not stable enough to walk through…” Indeed, she had endured “a blood transfusion the week before, just to bolster up her strength for this travel." Healthy teens need to bolster up their strength when travelling through aviation’s gulag; how much more an ancient invalid?

Anyone who has cared for a nonagenarian knows the effort required to move such folks from the car to the doctor’s office, let alone from Florida to Michigan, “where [Ms. Reppert] was planning to move in with other relatives prior to moving into an assisted-living facility.” Had you or I encountered this duo on their odyssey, we would admire their pluck and their devotion to one another; we might open a door for Ms. Weber so she could roll her mother through it or offer to keep Ms. Reppert company while her daughter tended to their luggage.

Which are yet more reasons we don’t “work” for the TSA. It sees in such vulnerable people not love and an indomitable spirit but helpless prey, and it attacks accordingly...

Incredibly, chillingly, the TSA defended its abuse of these harmless, pitiable women while quibbling that it did not “require” Ms. Reppert to disrobe since she could have “chosen” to miss her plane. Both its cruelty and its silly, childish denials are SOP for this demonic agency. The very old, the very young, anyone ill or handicapped — the TSA’s sociopaths at the checkpoints savage the weakest among us while its sociopaths at headquarters pooh-pooh the depredations.

Far from an anomaly, Ms. Reppert and her daughter are the latest in a nauseatingly long line of older victims. There was Phyllis Dintenfass in 2004, a retired teacher who was arrested, tried, and convicted for defending herself when a female screener groped her. And Thomas Sawyer, 61, who recovered from cancer of the bladder only to board his flight crying and soaked in his own urine after the TSA’s thugs deliberately broke the seal on his stoma bag. And Nadine Hays, who tried to transport her 93-year-old mother cross-country with a cooler of snacks the TSA’s own regulations permit; its goons wrestled the cooler away from her and traumatized her mother — then called the cops on Ms. Hays. She spent a night in jail after a strip-search. And Alaskan legislator Sharon Cissna, 69 and another survivor of cancer, whom the TSA hurt and humiliated. And so many others of a certain age, not to mention the children, people suffering from mental or emotional problems, the disabled.

Frighteningly, the TSA whitewashed most of these outrages as it did its abuse of Ms. Reppert by insisting its lackeys followed "proper procedure"...MORE...LINK